Home > Work > The Misfit's Manifesto
1 " You can be a drunk. You can be a survivor of abuse. You can be an ex-con. You can be a homeless person. You can lose all your money or your job or a husband or a wife, or the worst thing imaginable, a child. You can lose your marbles. You can be standing inside your own failure, a small sad stone in your throat, and still you are beautiful, your story is worth hearing, because you--you rare and phenomenal misfit--are the only one in the world who can tell the story the way that only you can. "
― Lidia Yuknavitch , The Misfit's Manifesto
2 " We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge. "
3 " What I learned from that intensely educational period of my life is that one kind of misfit is the person who suffers abuse or trauma and doesn't transcend it in the socially hoped-for way. We take a wrong turn or go deeper down. That's often looked at like a failure, but sometimes I wonder. I've learned things by taking the wrong turn or going down deeper that I could not have learned any other way. "
4 " If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the ability to swim the dark waters without fear, the astonishing ability to move through life's worst crucibles and not die, then you also have the ability to bring something back to the surface that helps others in a way that they cannot achieve themselves. "
5 " It dawned on me that we have to breathe and to find reasons to stay alive on our own terms. "
6 " I'm not the story you made of me. "
7 " I 'passed' in every sphere of regular life I entered, but I entered those spheres less and less, and spent more and more time under the overpass. "
8 " And maybe that's what a misfit is to me: someone with the ability to become increasingly dangerous, in incredibly loving ways, and not care what people think about it. [written by Jason Arias] "
9 " The girl I lost became the girl I found inside stories where girls nearly die but then don’t, where girls with their hair on fire invent ways to save themselves, where girls who are incarcerated by family or violence or love or social norms break out of culture and into journeys no one has ever imagined before. "